[DATACOMMANDER]

The paper didn’t mention any fundamental limitations. Its main point was that current serverless architectures suffer from two major performance deficiencies: inter[process/agent/what-have-you] communication is funneled through the bottleneck of slow storage (e.g., S3, DynamoDB); and various forms of optimizations based on caching are hamstrung by the fact that agents are short-lived and not directly addressable over the network.

The authors’ concern regarding the potential lack of open-source projects that integrate with the serverless platforms currently on offer is based on the severity—roughly between one and three orders of magnitude, overall—of the aforementioned performance deficiencies. It appears to be based on the assumption that open-source contributors won’t invest in what they (accurately) perceive to be a technically inferior platform. This part of the paper isn’t particularly clear, but I believe the authors are talking more about extensions to current serverless platforms than about application-level code that simply runs on top of said platforms.

Anyway, I’m no expert, but I’m fairly familiar with the subject matter and I read the paper in its entirety. I’m open to corrections from those who possess a deeper understanding of the issues involved.

One major caveat: I’m much more familiar with AWS than I am with its competitors, and I’m taking the authors’ word for it when they assert that their AWS-based examples are broadly representative.